Obama did Win – Happy Days

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Image by Barack Obama via FlickrI hoped he would.  I expected him to, and yet there was this little sneak of doubt in there because of the Bradley Effect idea or the possibility of chicanery by somebody.  And  I didn’t expect it to be such a blow-out. I was working and just checking in on cnn.com occasionally. When I left work the score was 174 to 68.  By the time I was halfway home Obama had garnered 373 and McCain was conceding.

Marilyn is a bit of a cynic and figures Obama doesn’t have the experience to get anything done.  I’m an optimist.  As far as I’m concerned, experience was the problem with McCain. That is before he drafted Palin. Once that happened he had much bigger problems.

When the only tool you have is a hammer you tend to go around pounding things because its what you know how to do and the tool predisposes you to do that. Experience is the same way. You’re apt to redraw reality to make it seem to conform to problems you know how to solve. If you don’t have experience (and you don’t panic) you can see things more for what they really are and notice things that wouldn’t make it past the filter of preconceptions that the old hands have.

One of the things I like most about the election’s outcome is the way race was dealt with. Obama didn’t win because he is black or in spite of the fact that he’s black. Instead, he managed to make race irrelevant, despite the efforts of others to bring it into the game. In the end he won on grasp of the issues, vision and style.

This doesn’t mean that race is a dead issue in America or Canada. Personally, I think racism will always be there, slouching around the edges of any crowd that gathers. Its just in our genes. So is the ability to ignore it or sublimate it, but it will never die out entirely.

We aren’t out of the woods yet, and Obama ain’t Moses.  But, because of his vision there is a chance to work with the rest of the world and start to get things back in order.  Just a chance, mind you, but with the Bush outlook as the dominant vision of the country there was no chance.  So we are much better off today than we were yesterday and I’m a happy, happy man. Congratulations America.

Posted by: swampy | 11-05-2008 | 01:11 PM
Posted in: Uncategorized